How to Write a CV for Your First Job — With Examples, No Experience Needed
How to write a CV for your first job with no work experience: what goes in each section, three example summaries, and six before/after bullet rewrites.
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A CV for your first job is built from a handful of sections: a header with your name, phone, email, and city; a two-to-three-sentence summary that names the role you want and your strongest evidence you can do it; an education section placed near the top; a skills list that mirrors the wording of the job ad; and an experience section built from things that were never paid jobs, like volunteering, coursework projects, sports teams, clubs, or an online community you moderate. When work history can't fill the page, a few more sections earn their place and do real work: certifications, short courses, languages, and a tight list of interests. Nobody reading a first-job CV expects employment history. They expect evidence that you show up, finish things, and can be trusted with responsibility.
The blank experience section feels like the problem, but it usually isn't. If you have organised anything, helped anyone, built anything, or kept a commitment going for months, you have material. The real work is translation: "I helped at a charity event" becomes "coordinated a 12-volunteer team at an event that raised €3,000". It is the same fact, told in the language employers actually hire in. This guide goes section by section, with three full example summaries and six before-and-after bullets you can copy the pattern from.
Build it section by section
The header
Name, phone number, a sensible email address, and your town or city. That covers it. If your email address dates from when you were thirteen, make a new one in the name.surname format before you apply anywhere. Skip the photo, date of birth, and full street address — recruiters don't need them, and in many countries they would rather not receive them for legal reasons. Add a LinkedIn URL only if the profile is filled in.
Put education first
A standard CV leads with work experience. A first-job CV flips the order, because education is your strongest verified credential right now. List your school or university, your qualification, and the dates. Add two or three relevant subjects or modules if they connect to the job, and your grades if they help you. If they don't help you, leave them out; you are under no obligation to volunteer bad news.
The summary, with three examples
Recruiters spend roughly seven seconds on a first scan, a figure cited so often in the industry it has become furniture. Your summary is what those seconds land on, so make it three sentences: who you are, what you're applying for, and the most concrete evidence you have. Here are three that work for different lives.
Fresh graduate applying for a marketing role:
Business graduate (2:1, University of Leeds) applying for the Marketing Assistant role at Hartley & Co. I ran social media for the university film society for two years, growing its Instagram from 300 to 2,100 followers, and wrote my dissertation on consumer behaviour in subscription services. Comfortable with Canva, Google Analytics, and deadlines that don't move.
School leaver applying for a first retail job:
Reliable school leaver looking for a weekend sales assistant position. I handled the till and stock at my school's charity shop pop-up for two terms and have volunteered every Saturday morning at a local food bank for over a year, so early starts and busy counters are familiar territory. Teachers and shift leads describe me as the person who stays calm when the queue doesn't.
Adult entering the formal workforce for the first time:
Organised and dependable applicant for the Administrative Assistant role at Westfield Clinic, moving into office work after eight years running a busy household and serving as treasurer of a 200-family school parents' association. I track budgets in Excel, chase late payments politely but persistently, and have chaired committee meetings that finished on time. I'm looking for an employer who values someone with that kind of patience.
Notice what all three do: a specific role, a specific number, and one detail that sounds like a human wrote it. None of them apologise for the missing job history, and none of them mention it.
The experience section you didn't know you had
Call it "Experience" or "Relevant Experience" — never "Work Experience", because that title promises something the section won't contain. Then list anything where you did real work for real people: volunteering, group coursework, a club you ran, a team you played on, a family business you helped in, a Discord server you moderate. Each entry gets a role-style heading (what you did, where, when) and one to three bullets.
The bullet formula is action verb, then what you did, then a number that proves scale or outcome. If a bullet has no number, ask yourself how many, how often, or how big, and one usually appears. If rephrasing is the part you get stuck on, Prezumi's AI editor rewrites bullets grounded in the profile data you actually entered, which means it sharpens what you did rather than inventing a job you never had.
Skills
Read the job ad, list the skills it asks for that you genuinely have, and use the ad's exact wording. This matters because around 75% of mid-size and large employers screen applications with ATS software before a human reads them, and that software matches exact words, so a synonym can cost you a match the human reviewer would have given you. Separate hard skills (Excel, Python, a second language, a forklift licence) from soft ones (teamwork, time management), and never use skill bars or star ratings, because a machine reads "four out of five stars in communication" as nothing at all.
Certifications, courses, languages, and interests
These are the sections most first-job CVs leave off, and they are exactly the ones that fill a thin page with real signal. Each one answers a question an employer is asking about someone with no work history: are you the kind of person who learns things on their own, and are you safe to put in front of customers?
Certifications. A first-aid certificate, a food hygiene certificate, a driving licence, or a free online course (Google Digital Garage, HubSpot, freeCodeCamp, a LinkedIn Learning course) all belong here. They are cheap or free, take a weekend, and prove you go and get qualifications without being told to. List the title, the issuer, and the year: "Level 2 Food Safety & Hygiene, High Speed Training, 2025." For a retail or hospitality job, a food hygiene certificate can be the line that gets you the interview.
Relevant courses. If your A-levels, GCSEs, or degree included something that maps to the job, name it. A "Young Enterprise" programme, a business studies module, a coding short course, or an extended project all show you have touched the work before.
Languages. List any second language with an honest level — native, fluent, conversational, or the GCSE grade. For customer-facing and international roles this is a genuine differentiator, and it is the easiest section to under-sell.
Interests. Keep this short and make every line carry weight. "Captain of the school football team" signals leadership and commitment; "built a personal website" signals initiative. Skip the generic "reading, music, socialising" that says nothing. Two or three specific interests are worth more than a long list of filler.
Here is what a finished first-job CV looks like with no employment history at all. The school leaver below has zero paid jobs, yet the page is full: volunteering and a school enterprise project stand in for work experience, and certifications, a Young Enterprise programme, a second language, and a short interests list carry the rest.
Six bullets, before and after
These rewrites are the whole trick. Each pair takes a true but invisible sentence and gives it a verb, a scope, and a number.
Before: Helped at a charity event. After: Coordinated a 12-volunteer team at a charity event that raised €3,000 for a local hospice.
Before: Babysat for neighbours. After: Provided regular evening childcare for three families over two years, managing meals, bedtimes, and homework for children aged 4 to 10.
Before: Member of the school football team. After: Trained six hours a week with the school football team for three seasons and organised travel logistics for 15 away matches.
Before: Run a Discord server. After: Moderate a 2,400-member gaming Discord, recruiting and training five volunteer moderators and resolving member disputes within house rules.
Before: Did a group project at university. After: Led a four-person coursework team building a budgeting app; delivered on deadline and presented the result to a panel of 30 students and staff.
Before: Helped in my parents' shop. After: Handled cash, stock counts, and customer questions in a family-run shop during weekend rushes of 100+ customers.
Every "after" version describes the same life as the "before" version. The difference is that the second one answers the question the employer is silently asking: what happens if I give this person responsibility?
Common mistakes on a first CV
Padding with adjectives. "Hardworking, motivated team player" tells an employer nothing they can verify. One concrete bullet beats ten adjectives, and a recruiter can smell the difference from across the room.
Writing about what you want. A summary that opens with "Seeking a position where I can grow" describes your goals, and the employer is shopping for theirs. Lead with what they get.
Stretching to two pages. A first-job CV should be one page. Some white space is fine, and a padded second page reads as exactly what it is.
Choosing a decorative template. Heavy graphics, text boxes, and two-column layouts can scramble the text order that ATS software extracts, so your carefully written bullets arrive as word salad. Use a layout that machines read cleanly — Prezumi's ATS-friendly templates are tested with real text extraction, and you can run any finished CV through the free ATS resume checker to see exactly what software pulls out of your PDF before an employer's system does.
Inventing experience. A first interview is mostly questions about your CV, and a fictional charity role collapses under the second follow-up question. Translate what you actually did as generously as the truth allows, and stop there.
Sending one CV everywhere. The skills section and summary should shift with every application, because the ad's wording shifts. It takes ten minutes and it is the cheapest advantage available to you.
FAQ
What do I put on a CV if I have no work experience at all?
Put your education near the top, then build an experience section from unpaid work: volunteering, school or university projects, sports teams, clubs, caring responsibilities, community roles, or online communities you help run. Describe each one with an action verb and a number, such as "organised weekly training for a 20-player squad". Then fill the rest of the page with the sections most people forget: certifications (first aid, food hygiene, a free online course), relevant courses, languages with an honest level, and two or three specific interests. Employers reading a first-job CV are looking for evidence of reliability and initiative, and these sections prove both.
How long should a CV for a first job be?
One page. Recruiters spend roughly seven seconds on a first scan, so a tight single page with your summary, education, skills, and three or four experience entries outperforms a padded second page every time. If you are struggling to fill the page, expand your strongest entries with an extra bullet rather than adding weak ones.
Do I need a summary on a first-job CV?
Yes. Without work history, the summary is the one place you control the first impression. Keep it to two or three sentences: the role you are applying for, your education or strongest credential, and one specific, verifiable achievement with a number in it. Skip generic openers like "motivated team player" — they are read as filler because they usually are.
Are CV templates okay for a first job?
Yes, as long as the template is machine-readable. Around 75% of mid-size and large employers run CVs through ATS software before a person sees them, and that software struggles with heavy graphics, text boxes, and unusual layouts. Pick a clean single-column or extraction-tested design, then check the result by running the PDF through a free ATS checker to confirm the text comes out in the right order.
